Each of the boroughs has its own naming history. The Bronx is named after early settler Jonas Bronck. Brooklyn comes from a Dutch word meaning “marsh” or “broken land.” Manhattan derives from a Lenape word which has been translated variously as “land of many hills,” and, more recently, “the place where we get wood for bows.” Henry Hudson himself is said to have named Staten Island Staaten Eylandt, after the Staaten Generaal, the Dutch parliament.

In New York City, you’re always digging up someone or something that wasn’t supposed to be there. It comes with the territory.

Build a Federal Court complex at Foley Square and discover the African Burial Ground. Start digging for a parking garage at the National 9/11 Memorial site and find a 18th century Hudson River sloop double-parked. This year, a vacant lot slated for a preschool in Gowanus, Brooklyn, is said to be the final resting place of the “Maryland 400”— a battalion of Minutemen who held the line against the British as Washington’s troops barely escaped capture (if the “400” failed, the American rebellion would have ended there).

​At a time of year when many New Yorkers spend their days at the beach, it may be fitting to ponder Andrew Lipman’s fascinating new book, The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast (Yale University Press, 2015). Lipman, who teaches history at Barnard College of Columbia University, recently won a Bancroft Prize for this, his first published book, and it is an impressive and entirely well-deserved accomplishment. The young scholar approaches the subject of Europeans encounters with the Algonquian-speaking peoples of coastal New York and New England in a wholly novel way. Instead of situating the story of intercultural relations on land, as historians traditionally do, Lipman demonstrates that the actual stage and struggle for power was decided on coastal waters. Additionally, he convincingly shows that the histories of coastal New York and southern New England share many commonalities, and need to be treated as one region.

Tom Glynn’s Reading Publics provides a richly detailed history of the development of libraries in New York City from the first -- the New York Society Library, founded in 1754 as a library for the new King’s College -- to the coalescence of the New York Public Library in 1911. In nine chapters, he examines a variety of institutions, including subscription, circulating, research, and collegiate libraries, giving a sense of the breadth of individual, corporate, and institutional sponsors who founded libraries in the city and the various purposes those libraries were to serve.

By Luke J. FederOn the evening of November 5, 1755, New Yorkers paraded through the city streets with effigies of the Pope, Pretender, and Devil. The revelers had propped up the effigies on a bier and had ensured that each was “hideously formed, and as humourously contrived.” As the festivities continued, the Devil disingenuously offered his respects to the Pope, but then used his pitchfork to “thrust his Holiness on the Back.” Meanwhile, the Pretender lingered patiently for the Pope’s orders. Participants continued through the streets with effigies in tow. The Seven Years’ War between Britain and France had begun roughly a year before, so New Yorkers stopped at the temporary home of Jean Erdman, the Baron Dieskau, a captured general for the French army. The baron sought “to prevent Mischief” by giving the crowd “some Silver.” In response, members of the crowd yelled, “Huzza! Huzza! Huzza!” Lastly, they “march’d off to a proper Place, and set Fire to the Devil’s Tail, burning the Three to Cinders.”[1]

In 1966, Milton M. Klein, a specialist in the history of colonial New York and early American law, commented on one of New York’s most important figures. “The history of New York,” Klein wrote, “would be a Hamlet without the prince.” But there was a problem: “no biography of this remarkable colonial politician has yet been written.” Nearly half a century later, James DeLancey, chief justice, lieutenant governor, and acting governor of New York, still does not have a biographer.[1]